Crop yield estimation may be used for determining investment costs and anticipated revenue in managing an orchard. Cost estimates for water expenditure, application and quantity of fertilizer to be applied to fruit trees, and manual labor costs needed for caring for the fruit trees from the growing season and until harvesting the ripe fruit from the fruit trees, for example, are based on fruit yield estimates. Any errors in fruit yield estimates may be very costly.
Methods based on human inspection to count a number of fruits on a tree may be time-consuming and inefficient. For example, determining a yield of fruit from a tree may be computed by defining an area of a fruit tree, for example, by using a metal frame and counting the fruits within the area defined by the metal frame. Counting the fruit in this manner in one or two trees in a hectare, for example, may be used to estimate the fruit yield in the orchard. Additionally, RGB photo snapshots of the trees may be taken and the fruits of each tree in the acquired photographs may be counted and the fruit count used to estimate fruit yield.
It is desirable to have a system and method for accurately and automatically counting fruit in fruit trees and mapping the number of fruit in the fruit trees over a geographical region, such as an orchard, for example.